“Perspective “is a simple word. In many ways, an all-encompassing word yet in most cases fails to influence a young person’s mind. When you are young the possibilities of life are boundless.  The bounty of fruit is there for the picking for those driven to partake of its succulent juice.  There is no restriction to your lust for one’s life’s appetite.

 

As a young man, I was fortunate to have the opportunity to work for and surround myself with elders who were masters of success.  I was not special, just a young sponge wanting to soak up a little knowledge. 

 

Three of these individuals, who happened to be distant cousins of mine, were brothers, and believe me Midas had nothing over these financial savants for everything they touched seemed to turn to gold.

These brothers were very different in expertise but together they were a unified force.  The business was real estate development. One was a high-caliber corporate lawyer.  Another was a builder who was second to none in his field. And the third was what I would call the frontman, the deal maker or the negotiator personified.  Together they seemed to be professionally unstoppable.

Their accomplishments were many.  In the area of home building in the 1960s, they were building thousands of homes to the point where they were named builders of the year.  They built and owned numerous US Post Offices scattered across the country.  When I started working for them they were building and owning shopping centers again covering many states. 

As I implied before they did not chase opportunities.  Opportunities came willingly to them. 

 

Now I was being trained to be a construction superintendent for shopping center construction and learning development negotiation. The operation was quite simple in its form considering the magnitude of the operation.  Our corporate office was a basic one-story non-descript block building. Just two of the brothers operated out of there.  The lawyer was part-time as he had his successful law practice.

They employed one and a half bookkeepers (one was part-time), and that was it as to the corporate staff. 

When I went on the road to build a shopping center three others employed by the company would join me. They were two master masons and one labor foreman.  That was it.  We would hire the necessary additional personnel on-site, just to meet the needs for that job.

It was a very lean operation, to say the least, and very financially solvent.

When I thought about the overall operation I just chucked it off as frugality was an ingredient to their success.  Besides who was I to question their motives. 

But I did.

 

One day in a leisure moment I happened to be alone with my negotiator cousin.  We were just chatting about family and a little business.  In the course of the conversation, I had to ask him “Why are you not enlarging the company,” building more, bigger everything. Just like the big national developer down the road from us.  Surely we have the capability he has.

I guess it was a question of a typical naive young up-and-comer might ask. 

 

 

He smiled and slowly responded. When he was young in the home-building phase of his career he had a larger operation with many more employees. Not quite as many as the big developer down the street in the high-rise office building with about 400 employees but many more than we have today.  We build within our means.  We are rewarded accordingly and we all live very comfortably family-oriented lives.  He continued and named the builder down the street.  He is financially stretched.  He is responsible for the lives of a very large staff and although his potential for earning a greater fortune he might have some very sleepless nights in the pursuit of it. 

 

But here is the real bottom line, “when each of us gets up in the morning we both can only put one pair of shoes on one shoe at a time. He could have many more pairs of shoes but that is just icing.”

So the real question is, “When is enough, enough?” 

Perspective.